Clavicula Salomonis: the history of the Key of Solomon

No grimoire has enjoyed a fortune comparable to that of the Clavicula Salomonis, the «Key of Solomon». The title promises knowledge handed down by the king of Israel, famed in the Bible for his wisdom and, in later Jewish and Christian tradition, for his mastery over demons. In reality the text we know is not a single work but a family of manuscripts, copied and reworked for centuries in Latin, Italian, French, German and Hebrew, none of which dates back to antiquity.

The roots: Solomon the magician

The image of Solomon as lord of the spirits is ancient. As early as the first century, Flavius Josephus, in his Jewish Antiquities, credits him with formulas of exorcism, and the Testament of Solomon, a Greek pseudepigraphon whose date is debated within the early Christian centuries, tells how the king forced demons to work on the building of the Temple by means of a ring brought to him by the archangel Michael. Onto this legendary background the Middle Ages grafted a large body of books attributed to Solomon, already condemned by theologians in the thirteenth century.

The closest antecedents of the Clavicula are the Greek treatises known as the Hygromanteia or Magical Treatise of Solomon, preserved in Byzantine and post-Byzantine codices from the fifteenth century onwards. The Latin and Italian Clavicula proper appears in manuscripts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Renaissance Italy was one of the main centres where it was copied and circulated.

Structure and content

In the most widespread versions the work is divided into two books. The first gathers prayers, experiments and a series of geometric figures and letters called «pentacles», associated with the seven planets of the astrological tradition; the second deals with the preparation of the operator, the planetary days and hours, the garments, the instruments and the materials. The frame of reference is that of medieval Christian ritual magic: fasting, confession, psalms, Hebrew divine names often transcribed uncertainly.

Variability is the most evident feature of the tradition. Copyists added, removed and merged chapters taken from other works; the number and order of the pentacles change from one manuscript to the next, and some eighteenth-century copies mix the Clavicula with material of entirely different origin. Speaking of an «original text» is therefore misleading: this is an open work that grew by layering.

Circulation, censorship, editions

In sixteenth-century Italy the Clavicula was the grimoire par excellence. The records of the Holy Office, especially those of Venice, frequently mention it among the books seized from clerics, physicians, students and treasure hunters. Books of necromancy were forbidden by the ninth rule of the Tridentine Index of 1564, but the ban did not stop manuscript copying, which in fact continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A Hebrew version, the Mafteah Shelomoh, was published in facsimile in the early twentieth century by Hermann Gollancz and appears in turn to have been translated from Italian or Latin models. Its modern fame, however, is due to Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who in 1889 published The Key of Solomon the King in London, collating several manuscripts in the British Museum.

For the historian the Clavicula is above all a document. It shows how the biblical figure of Solomon became the guarantor of forbidden knowledge, and how a book could survive condemnations and burnings thanks to the patience of copyists. Its countless versions are now the subject of philological studies that seek to reconstruct, manuscript by manuscript, the genealogy of this elusive text.